Archives for August 2010

Here I go again, this time to Wisconsin by way of Chicago. I’m spending a week in Spring Green, where I’ll be seeing four of the plays currently being performed by American Players Theatre at its two-stage complex. One by Shaw, one by Somerset Maugham, one by Lillian Hellman, and one by Athol Fugard: I’d say that’s a pretty nice package, wouldn’t you?
As usual, I’ll be staying just down the road from Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s country home, and spending most of my days slaving over a hot word processor. This is no vacation, alas and thank you very much. Mrs. T has had enough travel for one summer and prefers not to this time around, but Our Girl plans to drive up from Chicago and see Major Barbara with me on Saturday afternoon, after which we’ll dine at one of my favorite restaurants. In addition, I intend to nibble on Pleasant Ridge Reserve Cheese while I’m in town.
More as it happens.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, ORE.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

IN SAN DIEGO:

• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• The Taming of the Shrew/Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LENOX, MASS.:

• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

• The Taster (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)

• The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Aug. 29, reviewed here)

• Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

“He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise, i.e., cannot do something else.”
Paul Klee, diary entry #825 (Munich, 1908)

Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on Superman and wrote the libretto for Virgil Thomson’s Lord Byron, is interviewed in the Sturges House, designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939 and bought by Larson and the late James Bridges in 1967:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

Orson Welles said it, and he was right: “We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.” So it was pleasant indeed to receive this e-mail from a good and gifted friend:

You will survive as much more than a footnote in the Marsden Hartley catalogue.
Brazil and I say so.

True or not, it sure is nice to hear–not to mention inspiring.

“The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.”
Paul Klee, diary entry #951 (1915)

Pops: A Vida de Louis Armstrong has just been published in Brazil by Larousse. One of my Brazilian friends saw Pops in a bookstore over the weekend, took a photo of the display with her cellphone, and sent it to me via e-mail. It’s a bit fuzzy, but I think you’ll get the idea.
Here is the Portuguese catalogue copy, which is surprisingly intelligible, even to a monoglot like me:

Esta é a biografia definitiva de um gênio nascido na sarjeta que se tornou uma celebridade conhecida nos quatro cantos do mundo.
O biógrafo Teachout pesquisou e avaliou a vida e o trabalho de Armstrong como ninguém jamais o fez. Da infância pobre, do precoce interesse pela música, de sua vida em Nova Orleans até a mudança para Chicago, e muito além, o autor mergulha fundo na história desse ícone da música.
Tudo na medida exata. Palavras e sentimentos. Segredos e crueza. Síntese e exagero. A medida exata para alguém chamado Louis Armstrong.
Imperdível!

This is the first time that any of my books has been translated into another language and published by a major foreign house, and seeing as how I have a special love for Brazil and its music, I’m touched that I should have made my international debut south of the border.

“The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.”
Paul Klee, diary entry #733 (December 1905)